


Primum non nocere

by saltsanford



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Blood, Character Study, Gen, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 14:32:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7056424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltsanford/pseuds/saltsanford
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, you will realize that every question you asked was the wrong one, and every answer was fraught with lies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Primum non nocere

Your son’s name is David and you tell yourself that this is a coincidence.

There will come a day when you no longer believe in coincidences. You will not quite believe in destiny, either, but you _will_ believe in patterns, and you will learn to read the signs.

You will learn that the signs are _everywhere_.

Today is not that day.

Today you are a man who believes in facts and figures, hard numbers and cold logic. Your mind is a bright and brilliant thing, a thing that you have sharpened and honed with utmost care. You are going to change things. Your life, and your _name_ , are going to mean something.

 _Your name_.

The thing about a name like Alexander is that you have been _many_ names throughout the years—Al, Alex, Xander, Zee. In Project Freelancer, you are none of them.

In Project Freelancer, you are known only as the Doctor.

* * *

Your name is supposed to go down in history, but they take this from you on day one.

You first begin fitting the Simulation Troopers with their neural implants. _They are disposable,_ the Director tells you, clinical and calm, and you nod. Of course. There will always be more Simulation Troopers. They are _made_ to be disposable. Far better to make mistakes on them than the Freelancers, who have been so carefully handpicked over the years. There can be no mistakes when it comes to the Freelancers, but—

Your name is Doctor Tronosky. You do not make mistakes. Not you. _Never_ you.

The first sim trooper to find himself on your table— _Perez, Blue Team_ —bounces into the operating room with a smile. “Michael Perez,” he says, giving your hand a firm shake, and you find yourself smiling back.

“Welcome, Perez. I’m Dr. Alexander Tronosky.”

Everything about this first wiring goes flawlessly: the fitting, the anesthesia, the easy way Perez wakes up. Flawless, all of it, except—

“We would prefer if you did not tell the subjects your name,” the man you know only as the Counselor says to you afterwards.

“Why?” you ask, calm and not at all accusatory. It is your job, as a scientist, to question everything, and you do. _Why? How? When? What are you doing? Is there a better way?_

“We are simply hoping to protect the…anonymity, of everyone associated with the Project,” the Counselor answers calmly. “Your name will, of course appear in all of the journals and attributions when all is said and done, but…”

“There is no reason for the subjects to know your name,” the Director cuts in, his voice harsher than you feel the situation calls for. “Doctor will suffice.”

The Director doesn’t like you. He hired you because you were the only one capable of pulling this off. You are both men of science, but your mind is the more brilliant one, and the both of you know it.

“I understand. Doctor is fine,” you say. Your name will be in the medical journals. Your name will be spoken. Someday. No matter that you are not to use it during the Project.

No matter that today, it is taken from you.

 _That’s not quite right,_ you tell yourself. They do not _take_ it: the stripping of your name is a subtle thing, and for now, there is only the slightest prickle of disquiet down your spine, one that you push away with ease. You asked a question. They gave you an answer.

Later, you will realize that every question you asked was the wrong one, and every answer was fraught with lies.

* * *

The first soldier to die on your table— _Lin, Red Team_ —does not do so during the initial wiring. She stumbles back into your office a week later and barely manages to grit out that she has a headache before collapsing on the floor, blood pouring from her ears. You get her to the operating room and scrub in as quickly as possible, but it doesn’t matter. She bleeds until there is nothing left in her brain to bleed, and you are unable to stop it.

“The wiring was perfect,” you tell the Director, because this is not a mistake, just another opportunity to learn. “I will have to take a closer look at her charts to see all the variables that may have led to this.”

“ _Do_ see that you take _every_ variable into account, Doctor,” the Director says. “I cannot have anything like this happening to my Freelancers. Their implants are far more complex.”

“I am aware, Director,” you say, and it’s all too easy to keep your voice light and pleasant. It is, after all, _laughable_ that the Director speak as if he knows more about your implants than you do. “You worry about your Freelancers; I’ll worry about my implants.”

* * *

There are a few more close calls after that, but no deaths. You are not surprised: it has taken you years to design these implants. By the time the Freelancers are on your operating table, the process has been perfected time and time again. There is no danger in the wiring.

You think nothing of it until one day you push open the door to the operating room to see one of the last Freelancers sitting on the edge of your table. “Good afternoon—”

You stutter as the name on your clipboard registers. _David Tobias Fletcher, codename Agent Washington._

“—Agent Washington,” you finish. “I am the Doctor.”

He shakes your hand solemnly, a bundle of nerves and not even trying to hide it. “Hi. Is, uh, how long does this take?”

“It’ll take a few hours,” you say. He is pale and blue-eyed, nothing like your son’s bronzed skin and deep dark eyes, but they are without a doubt very nearly the same age. “You’ll be under anesthesia the whole time. You won’t feel a thing.

“And _why_ do I need these again?”

Question _everything_ ; you’d taught your own son that.

“Did no one explain the process to you, Washington?”

“They did,” Washington says. “I just don’t love the idea of something else in my head.”

Your David hated going to the doctor when he was younger. It used to make you and Maisha laugh— _“David, Daddy’s a doctor, see? He’s just like Daddy, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”_ Oh, how he’d cry, how he’d _scream_ —

Perhaps this is why you sit with Agent Washington a little longer than you have the other Freelancers or Simulation Troopers. He is not the first to have questions—you had sat with Agent Connecticut for quite some time too (and you liked her, she asked what you will later realize were all the _right_ questions)—but his are the first to be so obviously born from reluctance and fear.

“Everything will be fine,” you tell him before putting him under, “I promise.”

You will come to realize that in war, everyone has uttered words that will haunt them.

You have just said yours, Doctor.

* * *

You were chosen for this job not only because you are brilliant, but also because you are uniquely qualified. You are one of the few in the medical community who has a thorough understand of neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, and the murky waters where the two overlap. You have no problem admitting pride in your aforementioned brilliance, and take great pleasure in providing skill and instruction. You take greater pleasure still in being approached by those who simply don’t understand, or lack the talent to. However, you slowly realize that only one part of your talents are being taken advantage of. You haven’t even realized how much it’s been bothering you until—

“You worry about the implants, Doctor,” the Director says when the question trips out of your mouth. _Where were they going to get all of these A.I.?_ The UNSC has only given them permission to acquire one. “We will worry about the A.I.”

“I’m only trying to understand,” you say. “Since you and I both know that it’s impossible to copy an A.I., and—”

The Director scoffs. “Of course we are not going to _copy_ Alpha.”

Question _everything._ “Then what are you going to do?”

The Director looks at you, long and searching.  “You were not chosen to be a part of this project for your morals, Doctor,” he says, and it’s such an odd thing to say that you have no response. “You were chosen because you have a remarkable interest _in_ and talent _for_ progress. You want to change things, do you not? Make them better? Win this war?”

“I do,” you say. That is the thing, the most _important_ thing—finding the magic bullet, as everyone has been so fond of saying lately.

“Then,” the Director says slowly, “I hope I can count on your…cooperation in this matter.”

“In _what_ matter, exactly?”

“We are going to split the Alpha A.I.,” the Director says.

You nod. “A creative solution.”

The Director looks at you appraisingly. “ _Exactly,_ Doctor.”

A _necessary_ solution, for the greater good. “And the control variable?”

The Director frowns. “What about it?”

“The implants are designed to prevent a full A.I. from taking control of their hosts. To prevent too much overlap, so to speak. Will the control variable be altered, given that we are now working with fragments and not full A.I.?”

“Well, Doctor, I suppose that’s for you to tell us, isn’t it?”

* * *

You do not help them split the Alpha, but you know that what they are doing is illegal and unethical. You know that it is torture.

You know this, and yet you sleep soundly at night.

* * *

“But _she’s_ an A.I.,” you tell the Director and the Counselor, when they present you with Omega and tell you he needs to be implanted into Beta. “Why does an A.I. need another A.I.?”

“It’s Agent Texas,” the Director reminds you, “and she is not _aware_ of the fact that she is an A.I.”

“But—”

“And we will not be _telling_ her, either.”

“Why?”

“Think of it as another experiment,” the Counselor says. “We would like to see how Agent Texas functions with her team, without knowing what she truly is.”

You glance down at the cyborg body on your operating table. The body is good, the best you’ve seen, but… “And you don’t think she’s going to find out what she is?”

The Director has grown far less patient with your questions over time. “There are security measures in place to prevent that from happening, Doctor,” he snaps. “Now, implant Agent Texas with the Omega A.I.”

You aren’t sure why the Director is having you do this—there is no human flesh to work with, and you are sure this particular implantation is one he could handle himself—but he appears to not want to stand too close to Beta’s body. You do the implantation, and when Beta wakes up and demands to know what happened, the Director’s eyes are ablaze with something that you are unable to name.

* * *

And so the Project goes on. Things run smoothly, for the most part, and you bring the Freelancers in for regular check-ups. The wiring is strong and sure, fused tightly to their brain stems, and the Freelancers’ connection with their A.I. is seamless, as if the two are truly one. The control variable, you are pleased to see, is a non-issue.

“Things are going well,” you tell the Counselor, and he nods, pleased.

“I feel that we are at the turning point,” he says.

You feel it too: the turning point, the catalyst, the brink. The other side is so close, and you wait in anticipation to turn the corner.

What you don’t realize is that you are already on the other side, and there is no turning back.

* * *

Agent Carolina screams.

She screams, and she falls, and you cannot wake her up.

Two A.I. They’d told you to put two A.I. in her head, and you’d done it—another experiment, and how you love those—and it should’ve been fine. These A.I. were just fragments, after all, and the wiring was designed to hold a full A.I.

Agent Carolina’s scream rings through your dreams that night, and when you wake up in a cold sweat, you go to check on her. She is still fast asleep (you will not use the word coma, not yet), with Agent York dozing in the chair next to her.

A crazed thought occurs to you, of reaching behind her head and unlocking her ports and pulling Eta and Iota right out of her head. Part of you knows that this would be a terrible idea, and that disturbing the implants now, when you have no idea what’s going on in her brain, would likely leave her damaged and scarred for the rest of your life. The other part wants these A.I out, now, before it’s too late, before anything else goes wrong.

“Was it the punch?”

You jump, Agent New York’s voice cutting unexpectedly through the night. “The punch?”

“Tex knocked her out cold.” Agent New York sits up straighter in the chair, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “It made her stop screaming, but…is that why she’s like this now? Was it the punch?”

“It wasn’t the punch. It was the scream. The strain of two A.I.” Of this you are certain, you just don’t know _why._ You have run thorough check-ups on all of the Freelancers and their A.I., conducted interviews, run scans and tests, and still no one seems to have any idea what happened or why. The A.I. had, it seemed, momentarily been in control, been able to affect the Freelancers so severely that they were overwhelmed with pain and emotion. It shouldn’t have happened, it shouldn’t, because that would imply that you missed something, made a mistake, and you do not make mistakes—

Agent New York doesn’t seem to care about the why of it. “Is she gonna wake up?”

“I hope so,” you say, and you mean it. Your insides are _aching_ with it.

* * *

 “We are partners in this project,” the Director told you when you first signed on—so many documents, so many forms—

“We want your input every step of the way,” the Counselor said.

But—

But they do _not_ want your input every step of the way.

You begin to suspect that they aren’t telling you everything.

* * *

“Director, I’m not so sure that we should continue the implantation process.”

He looks at you sharply. “Excuse me?”

“After what happened to Agent Carolina…” You hesitate. You have never been a man who hesitates, afraid to speak his mind, but you find yourself pausing so often these days. There is an ever growing sense of disquiet, a feeling of walking on eggshells, and you cannot shake it. “Sir, it appears that these A.I. that you are harvesting—”

“We. The A.I. that _we_ are harvesting, Doctor.”

“Right. It appears that they are becoming more and more unstable.” You hesitate, again, before continuing. “I’m afraid that if we continue, we could cause serious brain damage to the Freelancers.”

“And?”

“ _And?_ Director—”

“It’s all part of the process, Doctor,” the Director says, and you notice now that he is distracted, far too distracted, and has been for some time. “Another experiment, so to speak.”

“Sir—these are the _Freelancers_ we’re talking about.”

“Exactly. We are talking about _my_ Freelancers. Now, prep Agent Washington for surgery and get out of my office.”

* * *

It begins as the soft buzzing of a bell in the back of your brain.

It is a disquieting prickle of unease, the sense that you are missing something, have forgotten something important.

It pulls at you, as Agent Washington falls screaming off your operating table, as he wakes up in the infirmary. You have lost patients before, Doctor, but you have never had a surgery go so _horribly_ wrong. You have never made a mistake like this before—

 _—have you been asking the wrong questions? You have, but that’s not it, that’s not what’s beating like a drum at the base of your skull, that’s not what you’ve_ forgotten _—_

You need to fix it. You need to fix this, but they won’t let you.

They barely allow you to monitor Agent Washington after his disastrous implantation. You watch him as closely as you are able, enough to see that he is struggling. The Director and the Counselor ignore all your requests— _he should be taking it easy, we need to remove the Epsilon A.I., he really shouldn’t be training this early, and especially not in hand to hand combat—_

You try.

Not hard enough, Doctor.

* * *

When the ship goes down in flames, there is only one thought that sears itself across your mind: _I have patients to protect._

I have _a_ patient to protect.

As you race through the burning hallways, as you duck into the smoky interior of the infirmary and find Washington unconscious and bleeding through the gaps in his armor, as you try to drag the debris off of him and scream for an evac team, you realize what you’ve been missing this whole time.

 _Question everything._ You have long thought that this was the most important thing, what you were put here to do—you are a man of science, of facts and figures, of hard logic and cold numbers, but—

You are a doctor, and you have forgotten the thing that is far, far more important than _question everything_ ever will be:

First. _Do no harm._

But you have done so much harm, Doctor Tronosky.

So much.

* * *

You stay with Wash.

You and the other doctors move all of the injured into what used to be the mess hall. The top of the ship has been peeled back like a can of soup, and you stare up at the cold, grey clouds. You give advice and directions and occasional help to the other doctors who ask for it, but you never stray far from Wash. Someone calls for an emergency evac team, and you all count the seconds until they arrive.

“Who’s in charge here?” one of the EMTs asks as they begin to filter into the mess hall.

You glance around the room. The Director is wide-eyed and dazed, searching desperately for something, and the Counselor is nowhere to be seen. You have time, but not much. “I am,” you say, and brush a hand through Wash’s hair. “I am. My name is Doctor Alexander Tronosky. I want this man on the first helicopter out of here.”

“Yes sir, right away.”

You signal to two of the other doctors and climb onto the chopper with them. Wash’s eyes flutter open, bewildered and so very blue. You bend over him, find his gaze and hold it.

“It’s okay, Wash,” you tell him, even though it is not okay, may never be okay again.

His eyes close, and the snow begins to fall.

* * *

The doctors and the nurses who work at the military hospital don’t like you, at first, and you suppose you can’t blame them. You descend from the chopper with blood all over your hands, demanding the immediate use of an OR, and at the very least, this grants you some sort of reputation. The reputation doesn’t matter. What matters is that when you say move, they move. That when you say scalpel, they had you a scalpel.

You have a patient to save. That is what you care about. Nothing more.

Wash’s first surgery is dicey. For five heart-stopping seconds, he flatlines on your table. It only adds to the ever-growing horror that is sitting heavy in your bones. You can’t hold the horror at bay forever, and it finally spills over the first night that Wash thrashes himself awake, screaming for a mother that you aren’t sure is even his. You calm him down and stay with him until he falls back to sleep before bolting for the bathroom and vomiting for what has to be a half an hour.

“You’re not telling us everything.”

You barely have the strength to lift your head off of the toilet basin to meet the eyes of Wash’s primary nurse. He is glaring at you mistrustfully, arms folded across his chest.

“I want to know what’s going on,” he says. “He didn’t get this way from a bump on the head.”

“I was the lead neurologist in Project Freelancer,” you admit finally. “We…I…fitted all of the soldiers with neural implants. They were each paired with an A.I. and Wash…his A.I…it went…”

“So what you’re saying,” the nurse interrupts him, “Is that _you_ did this.”

You look at him— _Jackson,_ his nametag reads— and meet the hard steel in his eyes. This, you know, is a man who has _never_ forgotten to do no harm.

“Yes,” you say, without hesitation. You will never be a man who hesitates, _never_ again. “Yes, I did. And now I’m trying to undo it.”

After all, you have things to do, Doctor. You have a patient to protect.

It occurs to you that you have never done this before. You have always been a healer, never a protector, but now, you must be both. The Director and the Counselor are always there, circling, watching, waiting, and as the days pass by, it is harder and harder to keep them at bay. You tell them that they have to wait. You tell them that Wash is hurt, and confused, and recovering from very serious surgery, and that interrogating him now could do permanent damage to his psyche, and they do not listen.

They do not care.

They do not care and one night, you round the corner whilst making your nightly rounds to see the Director about to enter Wash’s room.

“I told you _no_ ,” you say, thirty seconds later when you’ve successfully yanked the Director from the threshold of Wash’s room and shoved him up against the wall. It is, you have to admit, rather thrilling. “I told you not to go in there. I _told you_ that he has to _heal._ ”

The Director shoves you away and you step swiftly in front of the door to Wash’s room. You wonder if he’s going to hit you. You hope he tries. You’ve never hit anyone before, but you think you’d be more than happy to hit the Director.

He doesn’t hit you. He does, however, get right up in your face. You suspect he’s never hit anyone either. You suspect the pair of you look ridiculous. “Doctor, it has been almost a _month_ —”

“Exactly! He had brain surgery less than a month ago, on top of a whole host of other injuries! If you think I’m letting you in there to—”

The hospital staff may not entirely trust you, but when you call for security, security comes. As they escort the Director from the hospital and his furious eyes meet yours for the last time, you realize there are other eyes on you as well: the eyes of the other doctors and nurses, the eyes of your peers, the likes of whom you have thought to be beneath you for so many years.

You have been up too high for far too long, and you realize that you don’t want to be up in the clouds anymore. You want to be here, on the ground, with those who have never had the desire to fly too high.

You want to be with those who have only ever had the desire to heal, and to protect.

The next morning Jackson tosses you a lab coat with your name embroidered on it. “Here,” he says. “Thought you might need this. Since you’re apparently sticking around a while.”

You catch the coat and smooth it out in your lap, running your thumb over the blue stitching: _Dr. Tronosky._

Jackson looks a little startled when you stand and clap him on the shoulder, but he takes it in stride. “Wash is asking for you,” he says, and you nod.

“Let’s go.”

* * *

“I don’t have much time.”

The two nurses glance at each other, then at you. You suppose you can’t fault their confusion: you _did_ , after all, grab them by the back of their scrubs and tug them into a supply closet with perhaps an excess of drama. Time, however, was short, so when you saw Samira and Jackson walking down the hallway, you had to make a snap decision. They are the only ones you know to place your trust in.

“They’ve fired me,” you explain. “Stripped my clearance to this hospital.”  _And are probably planning to do much worse,_ you think, but do not say. They already look slightly terrified. “Once I leave, I won’t be able to come back through those doors.”

“What are you saying?” Jackson asks.

“I need you two to protect Wash, as much as you can, without drawing attention to yourselves. You won’t be able to keep the Director and the Counselor away from him entirely, but…he needs time to heal, as much time as you can give him.”

“Why are you asking us this? We’re just…we can’t do what you can do,” Samira says, and you shake your head.

“You have his best interests- and the interests of all of your patients- at heart,” you say, and pull a folder out from your lab coat.

“These are all my notes on Wash,” you say, handing it to Jackson. “Everything that he’s remembered about who he is, that I think is right. Don’t…don’t _push_ him, just…be _kind_. Help him heal, in the best way that you can.”

“We will,” Jackson says solemnly, and after a pause, Samira nods.

“We’ll watch over him, Doctor.”

* * *

The last time you see Wash, he is half-asleep and barely cognizant, but he recognizes you, and knows your name.

You know his name, too— _David, like your son, your son, who you don’t think you will ever be able to look in the eye again_ , _not after what you’ve done_ —but you don’t think that Wash will be able to go back to being David anymore. You want to stay, to help him unravel the mess of memories in his head, the mess that you are responsible for, but you have to go.

When you turn around to take your last look at him, he is asleep again, blue eyes shut against the world.

You go.

* * *

She finds you.

You can’t say you’re surprised.

“Well, well,” she drawls, her voice all sugar and poison. “Look what we have here. It’s one of Freelancer’s many loose ends. Kind of foolish of them not to clean you up, don’t you think?”

“They tried.” You sigh, and you straighten as best you can with your arms bound tightly to the sides of the chair. “What can I do for you, Beta?”

She gets right up in your face. “Don’t call me that.”

“Do you prefer to be called Agent Texas?”

“I would _prefer_ that you tell me where _Alpha_ is.”

“I don’t know.”

She tilts your chin up with the flat edge of her knife. “You expect me to believe that?”

You get a black eye and a pretty nasty knife cut across your forehead for your troubles, but you manage to tell her enough: that the Director banned you from the hospital, about the night you’d been blown backwards fifteen feet when your rental car exploded in the parking lot, how you’d run, and run, and not looked back. She eases up when you get to the part about burning off your fingerprints.

“You’re not gonna make this any fun at all, are you?”

“That depends. What’s your definition of fun?”

“I was _hoping_ to cut off every one of your fingers for every lie you told me, but you’re not lying. Are you?”

“No.”

Beta tilts her head at you, removing her helmet to reveal bright blue eyes. She’s cut her hair, you realize. Must be a rite of passage for those on the run from Freelancer.  “You hate them, don’t you? The Director, the Counselor, the whole goddamned project.”

“Yes.”

“Hate yourself too, huh?”

“Yes.

Beta rolls her eyes, and in one motion, slices through the ropes that bind you. “Alright, Tronosky. Why don’t you tell me what you _do_ know?

You tell her. About the interviews, the wirings, the trooper who bled out on your floor. You do not tell her about Wash, and where he is, but you tell her about everything else. She listens to you, calm and unflinching, until you call her Beta once more.

“I told you not to call me that!”

“Why not? It’s your name.”

She snorts. “Aren’t you going to tell me that my name is _Allison?_ That’s what all the charts say.”

“You were A.I. designation Beta,” you say, unsure of why this seems so important. “You were Beta, before you were Allison. Old habits, I guess.”

She stares at you for a long time, electric blue eyes boring into yours. “You haven’t said you’re sorry,” she says abruptly.

“Would it make a difference to you if I did?” you ask, and she shakes her head. “You don’t care if I’m sorry. None of them—the Freelancers, the Simulation Troopers—they don’t want my sorry. My sorry doesn’t change anything. Sorry would just make _me_ feel better. I don’t deserve to feel better. I need to _be_ better.”

* * *

If this were a story, this would be the part where you set off to make things right.

You would team up with Beta and help her to destroy Freelancer from the outside in. You would find the Director, and the Counselor, and make them suffer. You would find the Freelancers, maybe even the Sim Troopers, and help them heal.

But this is a not a story. There are no happy endings.

There is only you, standing in front of the piles of ashes that was once the hospital where you last saw Wash, where a young man far better than you handed you a clean white lab coat and gave you back your name.

There is only _you_ , and the weight of the things you have done, that you must carry now for the rest of your life.

You begin to walk.

* * *

You watch the ships.

It’s become something of a ritual over the years. You are off the grid, now—on paper, and in the computers, Doctor Alexander Tronosky has long since died—and after a while, you stop checking the papers. You stick to these tiny planets, run-down towns, places that do not have much medical support, and certainly not the hands of a neurosurgeon. It is a coincidence that you happen to hear that Freelancer has been destroyed— _Colorful Space Marines Stop Corruption_ , that’s the tagline they’re going with, and it makes you smile—but you do not look into it further. It is someone else’s story, and you are glad that they have laid it to rest.

As for you, Doctor—

When you sense that it is time to leave a place, you go to the spaceports and wait. Not the big, flashy ones, but the run down ports on the edges and the outskirts. You find a bench, and you sit, and you wait. You like to watch them take off and streak away into the night, and when the time is right, you stand and you say—

“Excuse me!”

The pilot of the ship you have chosen turns. “Can I help you?”

“This ship. Where is it going?”

“Oh, you don’t want a ride on this bucket, sir,” the pilot says. “There’s no passengers here. It’s a supply drop only, and probably the last for a while.”

“Why’s that?” you ask.

“Look, I don’t ask the questions. They tell me to supply drop, I supply drop. They tell me to stop, I stop.” He sighs at your insistent look. “Some backwater planet. Rumor has it the people are smack on the middle of some nasty civil war. It’s a simple in-and-out job.”

“A civil war, huh?” You heft your bag onto your shoulder. “Got room for a co-pilot?”

The pilot sighs. “Your funeral.”

“Let’s hope not,” you say, and climb the ladder. It doesn’t take long for the pilot to ready the ship, and before you know it, you are surrounded by the stars once more.

“May as well get comfortable,” the pilot says, yawning and flicking the controls to autopilot.

“I am comfortable,” you say with a smile. Outside, the stars pinwheel by.

“Good. It’s a long way to Chorus.”

* * *

You were once a man who believed in coincidences.

You do not believe in destiny, but as the years pass, you learn to trust your gut. You learn to read the signs. You drift through the worlds, helping and healing and fading away before you make yourself too noticeable. Your name, you tell to no one. Your name is not what matters. Your name is safe and secret, embroidered in bright blue on the lab coat you carry with you everywhere.

Your mind is brilliant and your hands are magic, and although you cannot undo all the wrong you have done, these are the tools you use to do better. This is what matters. The is the important thing, the only important thing.

You use your hands to heal. You use your mind to ask the right questions.

You do no harm.

**Author's Note:**

> :D
> 
> Something a little different than my usual style! I grew very fond of Tronosky during his brief appearance in _The Long Way Down_ , so I thought I'd see what he was up to. He was all too happy to tell me.


End file.
